Re: Development process in the Ada community

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

The problem with any license is that once it gets expensive enough or
restrictive enough, sooner or later someone says "Go Pound Sand!" If someone
says "Here's Library X under the GPL..." and Microsoft doesn't want to be
forced into GPL'ing their stuff just to use Library X, they're going to go
hire a few dozen programmers and say "Go make me something that looks kind
of like this..." They certainly have the money they need not to be cornered
into using someone else's stuff for lack of ability to build one of their
own. Hoping that one day they'll accidentally include some GPL'ed code into
Microsoft Office and be forced to release their source is probably
unrealistic.

I don't begrudge Microsoft using any license they like and I seriously doubt
that the bulk of their customers care if they get the source code or not. If
you don't like their license - go buy something else. That's the free market
system. Maybe one day the Open Source crowd will have everyone using their
products and insisting they get the source or they won't buy and Microsoft
will go the way of Studebaker. I'm just not going to hold my breath waiting
for that event. :-)

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


"Florian Weimer" <fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote in message
news:87vgalbetj.fsf@deneb.enyo.de...
>
> Of course they use the GPL only if they have to (e.g. for parts of
> Interix), but they pay at least one person for working on free
> software which is licensed under the BSD license (and no, it doesn't
> run only on Windows)...